Forty-five states levy a statewide sales tax, and a seller shipping nationwide can trip a filing obligation in any of them without ever setting foot there. The numbers below are the ones that govern that exposure, each with the source it came from. Read them as a map of where the work is, not as tax advice.
45 states, five holdouts, and one that is both
The Tax Foundation’s “State and Local Sales Tax Rates, Midyear 2026,” published July 6, 2026, puts it plainly: “Forty-five states levy a state-level sales tax, and 38 states allow local sales taxes (including Alaska, which has no statewide tax).”
Five states impose no statewide sales tax at all: Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire and Oregon. Alaska is the odd one out, because its localities can and do tax. The same Tax Foundation table shows Alaska at a 0.00 percent state rate with an average local rate of 1.82 percent and a maximum local rate of 7.85 percent. A seller who writes off Alaska because “it has no sales tax” is wrong in the places that matter.
10.13 percent at the top, 7.53 percent on average
From the same July 2026 Tax Foundation data, the highest combined state and average local rates are Louisiana at 10.13 percent, Tennessee at 9.61 percent, Washington at 9.57 percent, Arkansas at 9.48 percent and Alabama at 9.46 percent. The national population-weighted average combined rate is 7.53 percent.
The split between state and local varies more than the totals suggest. California has the highest state-level rate at 7.25 percent, while Colorado has the lowest non-zero state rate at 2.90 percent and one of the highest average local rates at 4.99 percent. Alabama’s average local rate, 5.46 percent, exceeds its 4.00 percent state rate. No statewide rate changed between January and July 2026.
12,414 jurisdictions, and why that number is not what it looks like
There is no government census of US sales tax jurisdictions. The figure everyone quotes comes from a software vendor. Vertex, in its 2025 End-of-Year U.S. Sales Tax Rates and Rules Report, announced February 3, 2026, described “Tracking 12,414 U.S. tax jurisdictions in 2025 where sales and use tax rate and rule changes occurred.”
Read that sentence carefully. It counts jurisdictions where something changed, not jurisdictions that exist. Anyone printing “there are 12,414 sales tax jurisdictions in the United States” has quietly converted a change log into a census. Avalara, another vendor, says “more than 12,000.” The Tax Foundation’s own jurisdiction count, “over 11,000,” dates to 2020 and cites Vertex anyway.
Vertex’s other 2025 figures give a better feel for the churn: 681 rate changes or new rates, 335 new taxing jurisdictions described as a ten-year high, 108 new taxing cities against 51 the prior year, and 219 new district taxes. Distribution is wildly uneven. The Tax Foundation noted in 2020 that “New Jersey, despite having hundreds of municipalities, has just two sales tax jurisdictions, while Texas has over 1,600.”
$100,000 or 200 transactions, and the slow death of the transaction test
The threshold everyone cites comes from South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc., 585 U.S. 162, decided June 21, 2018. Justice Kennedy described the South Dakota statute this way: “The Act applies only to sellers that, on an annual basis, deliver more than $100,000 of goods or services into the State or engage in 200 or more separate transactions for the delivery of goods or services into the State.”
Note the word “or.” The test is disjunctive, which is why a seller moving 400 units of a $9 product into a state can owe there while a seller shipping 40 units of a $900 product does not.
States have been repealing the transaction half. Avalara counted 17 states that had eliminated the 200-transaction threshold as of August 1, 2026, though at least two entries on that list, California and Massachusetts, never operated a 200-transaction test to begin with, so a stricter count lands closer to 15. The most recent repeal is documented by the state itself: Illinois Department of Revenue Informational Bulletin FY 2026-12 states that effective January 1, 2026, “The 200-transaction threshold for requiring remote retailers and marketplace facilitators to collect and pay destination-based sales tax will be removed.”
Thirteen states never created a transaction threshold at all, among them Texas, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Florida and Arizona. Fourteen states plus Puerto Rico and Washington, DC still use one. Two run conjunctive tests that are easier to clear: Connecticut requires $100,000 and 200 transactions, New York $500,000 and 100.
Every sales tax state now has a marketplace facilitator law
The Tax Foundation, in “Marketplace Facilitator Laws: Past, Present, and a Better Future,” published November 2, 2023, states that “every state that imposes a sales tax has adopted a means of taxing marketplace facilitators.” Missouri was last, effective January 1, 2023 under RSMo section 144.752.
The Missouri statute is the cleanest description of what these laws do. Facilitators must collect and remit “on sales made through the marketplace facilitator’s marketplace by or on behalf of a marketplace seller that are delivered into the state… regardless of whether the marketplace seller for whom sales are facilitated possesses a retail sales license.”
Sellers routinely read that as “the marketplace handles it, so I am done.” Two numbers say otherwise.
First, registration often survives. The New York State Department of Taxation and Finance page on marketplace providers, updated January 15, 2026, answers whether a seller selling solely through a marketplace still needs to register: “Yes. You still need to apply for a Certificate of Authority to be a sales tax vendor and file periodic returns even if the tax was collected for you.”
Second, states disagree on whether marketplace sales count toward your own nexus threshold, and the disagreement is not subtle. Washington’s Department of Revenue instructs sellers to “Calculate the threshold using all of your retail sales to Washington customers, including sales made through a facilitator.” Missouri’s guidance says the same. Pennsylvania’s says the opposite: a remote seller “should use only its direct sales and those sales made through a marketplace facilitator that does not collect sales tax on its behalf.” Any blanket rule you apply across all states will be wrong in some of them.
20 states, 2026 sales tax holidays
The Tax Foundation’s “Sales Tax Holidays by State, 2026,” published July 20, 2026 and updated July 24, counts 20 states offering holidays in 2026, up from 19 in 2025. Illinois reinstated a back-to-school holiday running August 7 to 16, 2026, though it is a rate reduction from 6.25 percent to 1.25 percent rather than a full exemption. Alabama added a holiday for SNAP-eligible food.
The Tax Foundation is not neutral on the policy, calling the 2026 crop “inefficient and ineffective” and noting that “companies can absorb up to 20 percent of the benefit.” For a seller, the practical point is narrower: a ten-day window where one state’s rate on one product category changes, and your tax engine has to know.
What the numbers add up to
Forty-five state regimes, thousands of local ones, a nexus test that half the states have quietly rewritten, facilitator laws that shift collection without always shifting registration, and 20 states that change the rules for a week each August. None of that is difficult in any single instance. It is difficult in aggregate, monthly, forever.
Most sellers respond by pushing the reconciliation into software. Tools built for marketplace accounting, ConnectBooks and A2X among them, pull settlement data out of Amazon, Shopify, Walmart, TikTok Shop and eBay and split out the tax the marketplace already collected from the tax that remains the seller’s problem. That separation is the part worth automating, because it is the part that determines whether a filing is right.
Rates and thresholds move constantly. Confirm any figure here against the relevant state’s Department of Revenue before you file, and talk to a tax professional about your own facts.